Cheers to Monday summary

Once you’ve named your stressors and can see them clearly, the next step in the Un-Stressing Method is to Sort them. Workplace stressors fall into five categories, and knowing which one you’re dealing with is what makes purposeful action possible. Treating all stress as the same thing is why most attempts to manage it fall short.

Schedule stress is the pressure that builds when there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it. Since early 2020, employees have been attending roughly three times as many weekly meetings – a 192% increase – and research confirms that back-to-back meetings accumulate stress. The brain needs a gap between demands – it needs time to reset.

Social stress is the strain from difficult relationships and fractured team dynamics. It activates the same part of the brain as physical pain. Many workplace conflicts that look like disagreements over tasks are actually rooted in strongly held values colliding, and neither party tends to realise it. That’s how social stress accumulates. 

A practical tool for getting ahead of this is a trust map. For each key working relationship, ask yourself whether trust needs strengthening, repairing, or simply keeping in good shape. Then take one concrete step in that direction.

Now that you’ve sorted your stressors into categories, the third step in the Un-Stressing Method is to Solve them. Start by drawing a simple grid of four boxes. Stressors that feel important to you in your current role go in the top row – the less important ones go in the bottom. On the left side sit the things outside your control; on the right, the things within it. Every stressor lands somewhere in that grid, and where it lands tells you exactly what to do next.

Acknowledge is the response for stressors in the bottom-left box – neither important nor within your control. The temptation is to brush these off – but your brain doesn’t work like that. In reality, it doesn’t release what hasn’t been acknowledged – it keeps circling back, draining energy long after you’ve decided the stressor doesn’t matter. A stalled project that's been deprioritised due to budget cuts, for instance, may genuinely matter to you – but if it's neither important in your current role nor something you can influence, it belongs here.

Ask is the response for stressors in the top-left box of your stressor grid – important but outside your control. A frozen hiring process, a deadline set by someone else, or a funding decision made above your level all fall here — things that matter but sit outside your reach.

Most people don’t ask for help anywhere near as often as they should – in fact, research suggests we underestimate how willing others are to help by 50 percent or more. But it’s also important to ask in the right way. Requests framed around learning and growth land well. Requests that simply offload a problem onto someone else tend to erode trust.

The Dutch have a word for the practice of heading outside into the wind to clear your head and shake off whatever’s been weighing on you. That word is uitwaaien, which literally means “out-blowing”. For the Dutch it’s entirely unremarkable, something you simply do when you need a fresh mind. But it’s a remarkably useful concept because it captures something essential: releasing stress opens up space for calm, laughter, and joy. Joy gets buried under chronic stress. But when the pressure eases, it becomes accessible again.

A practical way to get clear on what joy and calm actually look like in your own life is to picture yourself at 90 years old, looking back on your life. The question is whether the life you built felt worth living – whether you were present for it, whether you let yourself enjoy it. Through this exercise you make clear what actually matters, and what’s simply been consuming energy without giving anything back.